Rocksteady: Traversing Rooftops Integral In Arkham City

Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham City is out in the US tomorrow and with it brings one critically acclaimed improvement: the ability to go rooftop to rooftop.

In a recent interview with the US PS Blog the game's director Sefton Hill is most proud of the game's new achievements.

“The biggest thing we’ve focused on is his navigation and his ability to get around Gotham City, making that as exciting and fun as possible."

“The game is much bigger, a larger expanse but also much more vertical.”

In Arkham City you will be able to use the glide feature better to your advantage, more so than you could have in Arkham Asylum. You will also be able to upgrade your grapple to various levels.

“You can combine these two moves, the dive and grapple boost, to get around Gotham City without even touching the ground, if you get good enough,” he enthused.

“What’s really nice is that you have to constantly be evaluating your surroundings like Batman would: where to dive, where to move as you weave through back alleyways and over the tops of buildings. It gives you the feel of being Batman in Gotham City. We wanted to live up to that promise.”

The gadgets in the game will be aplenty and you will be able to use your old Arkham Asylum save file to upload in Arkham City so you can carry the tools you collected in that game, to this one.

“Our focus was to give the player as many options as possible,” Hill said, commenting that the game’s skill tree isn’t focused on customisation because in-game choices of how to use skills are more important – including how to utilise the upgraded combat abilities.

“We didn’t want to overcomplicate the system. I think its strength is that it focuses on selecting the right move, not long combos or complicated sequences,” Hill noted.

“You really feel like Batman when you play because it’s a very simple, very rewarding combat system. Now the number of options has been expanded massively. We’ve added a lot of things, like simultaneous counters so that Batman can fend off two, three enemies at once. We added projectile counters, too, so he can throw objects back at enemies

” Enemies can use combo attacks now, and you have to pull while countering multiple strikes. You can perform beatdowns, a series of really fast blows that can finish an enemy off without you having to use a takedown. You can even use your gadgets in combos: the Bat claw, the Explosive Gel, REC, even the Freeze Blast.”

Batman: Arkham City is out tomorrow in the US and on Friday in the UK for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC.